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The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution Kindle Edition
Michael Dillon's incredible story, from upper-class orphan girl to Buddhist monk, reveals the struggles of early transsexuals and challenges conventional notions of what gender really means.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication dateDecember 11, 2008
- File size1642 KB
Editorial Reviews
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Review
“Oddly mesmerizing, as close to Shakespearean tragedy as you can come with the words tube pedicle and mass of cartilage in your book. It's Romiette and Julio.” ―Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review
“A wild read…an absorbing look at a century of medical breakthroughs that allow people to change noses--or genitalia--to match their identities. A–” ―Entertainment Weekly
“Replete with obsession, identity crises, and personal recreations…If you're looking for intrigue, this book is fairly dripping with it.” ―Washington Blade
“Mesmerizing…Novelist Kennedy's literary chops serve her well in this fascinating and heartbreaking social history and tale of two lost souls, for it is as absorbing and powerful as any fiction.” ―Booklist
“Part biography, part cultural history, The First Man-Made Man is a dramatic, revelatory narrative that brightly illuminates the psyche of the first female-to male.” ―Chicago Sun Times
“The First Man-Made Man is oddly mesmerizing, as close to Shakespearean tragedy as you can come with the words 'tube pedicle' and 'mass of cartilage' in your book. It's Romiette and Julio.” ―New York Times
“Sheds welcome light on the changes in society's attitudes and in scientific thinking about gender.” ―Kirkus
“An enlightening tour of how mid-century science conceptualized gender, hormones and transsexual surgery...an entertaining and informative popular history.” ―Publishers Weekly
“This book is pure brilliance-the research, the execution, the wonder and heartbreak.” ―Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and The Great Failure
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The First Man-Made Man
The Story of Two Sexes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution By Pagan KennedyBLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2006 Pagan KennedyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-015-7
Contents
Part I: Make The Body1. He Proposes............................................32. When There's No Word for It3. Magic Pills4. Sir Harold's Scalpel5. With Girls One Has to be Careful6. Orchid7. A Passport into the World of WomenPart II: Fit the Mind8. The Third Eye9. The Calling Card10. Becoming Jivaka11. A New Age12. RizongEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesIndexChapter One
HE PROPOSESMichael Dillon, a bearded medical student, fiddled with his pipe and then lit it nervously. The year was 1950; the city, London; the restaurant, discreet. Dillon shared his table with a person so odd-looking that the other diners in the restaurant ogled and whispered to one another. He - or was it a she? - wore a blazer and trousers, cropped hair, and tie, but seemed to be hiding breasts under the suit jacket. In fact, Roberta Cowell had been born male, but she could not live as a man anymore. She had begun dosing herself on massive amounts of estrogen - enough to melt away her muscles and put a blush in her cheeks. With no idea how to push her transformation further, Cowell was stuck in a no man's land between the sexes - a terrible place to find yourself in 1950.
The word "transsexual" had yet to enter common usage. Almost no medical literature acknowledged that thousands of people felt themselves to be trapped in the wrong bodies and would do anything - including risk death - to change their sex. Michael Dillon, the medical student, had authored what was then one of the few books in the world to delve into the subject. In an eccentric little volume called Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, he had argued on behalf of people like Roberta Cowell. Dillon proposed an idea that seemed wildly radical at that time: Why not give patients the bodies they wanted? Thanks to recent technological breakthroughs, doctors could transform a man into a woman and visa versa. But because of the stigma against these sex changes - as well as laws that prohibited castration - only a few people in the world had ever crossed the line.
Roberta Cowell had discovered Michael Dillon's book and decided she had to meet the open-minded scholar. She'd written to him care of his publisher and they'd exchanged a flurry of letters. Now, finally, they sat across from one another.
Dillon turned out to be handsome, Cowell reported in her autobiography. "He was a good deal younger than I had expected and wore a full beard. Not bad-looking, he was a very masculine type."
Maybe too masculine. Despite his progressive attitude about sex-change treatments, Dillon "appeared to have a very low opinion of women." It was an attitude that Cowell couldn't abide. After they'd eaten, she lingered at the table to debate the issue of women's intelligence. They ordered coffee. Dillon gestured with his pipe as he lectured her about the differences between the male and female brain. He clearly liked to throw his opinions around, especially with a lady present.
Cowell played along. After all, if she was ever to emerge from the awful limbo of her body, she would need his help. Dillon seemed to relish his role as her protector, fingering his droll little beard, dropping Latin words and medical terms. He assured her that sex changes did exist. It was now possible for surgeons to entirely re-shape the human body, he claimed. In fact, he possessed startling proof of exactly what medical science could do.
Then, Michael Dillon fell silent. He puffed smoke and fidgeted with his coffee cup but did not drink. He glanced up at Roberta, and then, finally, spoke. "I don't really see why I shouldn't tell you. Five years ago I was a woman."
* * *
More than a decade earlier, an athletic blonde named Laura Dillon roared through the streets of Bristol on her motorbike. She wore her hair short and a sports jacket hid her breasts; a skirt, her only concession to femininity, flapped around her calves. With her broad shoulders, patrician accent, and Eton haircut, she could easily pass for a pampered young man. In fact, Laura had grown up thinking of herself as above the common lot. Her brother, the eighth baronet of Lusmullen, presided over a threadbare estate in Ireland, and her family still retained a residue of an ancient fortune.
At first glance, Laura seemed to be a fellow just out of Oxford, dismounting his motorbike with a dashing leap. But blink again and Laura was nothing but a cross-dressed girl. People who passed her on the street couldn't help staring, confused by the double image she presented. The children and old ladies were the cruelest, shouting insults or demanding Laura explain herself. When they came toward her, Laura froze her face into a mask. She refused to let them see how they got to her.
Still, she preferred their taunts to the alternative: female clothing. Evening gowns terrified her - they invited young men to slide their arms around her waist. Ordinary dresses filled her with the sickening sense that she had been obliterated. She knew herself to be a man, a man who was disappearing inside a ridiculous body, underneath breasts and hips. She didn't think she could go on this way anymore.
Pills saved her. Laura Dillon had managed to get hold of testosterone pills in 1938, soon after she'd graduated from college. She became the first woman on record to take the drug with the intention of changing her sex. Over a period of several years, the hormone therapy transformed her into a muscular, deep-voiced man with fuzz on his cheeks. As soon as Dillon could looked entirely male, he became invisible. Pumping petrol at the garage where he worked, greasy in his coveralls, Dillon easily passed as just another workingman. More than passed. He became bland-looking, unremarkable, ordinary - which was what he'd always wanted. "How different was life now! I could walk past anyone and not fear to hear any comments for no one looked at me twice," he wrote about his earliest, testosterone-fueled transformation. By the early 1940s, Dillon had mustered the courage to leave the garage for medical school - under his male name.
But hormones could only take Dillon so far. If other men happened to catch a glimpse of him in the locker room or public baths, they would know immediately he had been born female. So in the early 1940s, Dillon sought out Sir Harold Gillies, Britain's top plastic surgeon. Gillies had reconstructed the genitals of soldiers who'd been bombed or burned, but he had never built a penis from scratch on a woman's body. It would be a grueling process, and Gillies could not guarantee the results.
At least the operation would be legal. While an arcane law protected male genitals from "mutilation," no such bans applied to female genitals and reproductive organs.
Dillon would eventually undergo a series of thirteen operations to construct a penis. He began the treatments in 1946, while he was a student at Trinity College medical school in Dublin and he finished his surgeries in 1949, a year before he met Roberta Cowell. Gillies had to harvest skin for the new organ from Dillon's legs and stomach; Dillon suffered from oozing infections where the skin had been flayed; at times, he was so debilitated he had to walk with a cane.
And why did Dillon want the penis so badly? Not necessarily for sex. Rather, a penis would serve as a membership card into the world of men, their bathrooms and their gentlemen's clubs in London. It was the lack of a penis that held him back, "for without some form of external organ he could hardly undress for the shower with the rest of the crew," as Gillies noted. Furthermore, if Dillon fell ill, a penis would allow him to check into a hospital without having to explain why his genitals did not match the rest of his body. A penis, along with the beard and the pipe, would hide his history, keep his secret that much safer. Dillon feared, above all, the tabloids. If the rumor got out that Michael Dillon, brother to a baronet, had once been a girl, the gossip would surely be trumpeted in every low-class newspaper in Britain. As Dillon saw it, a penis would help to safeguard his privacy and his family's honor.
So during the mid-1940s, Dillon lived a curious double life: he was both a medical student in Dublin and a patient in England. During the university term, he shadowed doctors on their hospital rounds, assisted in the surgical theater, and even performed an appendectomy. When the term ended, Dillon would ride a train through the English countryside to small town called Basingstoke, home to Rooksdown House, the hospital overseen by Sir Harold Gillies. Here, men in military uniforms - their heads swaddled in bandages - lolled on park benches, putting cigarettes to the holes where their mouths should have been. Burn victims, a platoon of shot-up soldiers, children with cleft palettes and survivors of factory accidents - Dillon joined this small society of the mutilated and maimed.
Sir Harold, as the patients called him, understood that recovery had as much to do with the mind as the body. Some of the patients at Rooksdown were so disfigured that, even with the best care, they would remain outcasts for the rest of their lives. Such patients had to be encouraged to relearn the art of happiness, which is why Sir Harold banished many of the rules that make hospitals such grim places and coaxed his charges into dancing the foxtrot, growing zinnias in the garden, or venturing out into the town surrounding the hospital for a beer. As a result, Rooksdown became the kind of place where, even in the middle of the night, you might come across a one-eyed man teaching himself to ride a bicycle down the hall. Or a burn victim wearing blue toenail polish. Or a surgeon pouring a pint of human blood into the tomato patch. "This was no ordinary place," Sir Harold wrote, with typical understatement.
Dillon thrived at Rooksdown. He befriended a man with plastic ears, the girl who'd been scalped by a factory machine, and the Navy officer who'd had his genitals ripped off by the gears of a machine - "the nature of his operation was similar to my own." Stunted by years of ridicule, Dillon flowered in the tolerant atmosphere of Rooksdown: he turned witty, expansive, even popular. "We felt that Rooksdown was more of a country club than anything else. When we returned we would greet old friends and be introduced to new ones," he wrote later. "At Christmas ... there was a grand party on the Eve, which I M.C.'d twice from a wheelchair, thus making my debut into the social world from which I had been so long debarred."
The local people had grown used to seeing to patients without noses or jaws walking around town. At the post office or on the street, Dillon and his friends could expect smiles and hallos from the villagers. But the patients knew that once they boarded the train, they would become pariahs at the very next town - passengers would flinch, stare, scuttle away from them.
Dillon had one advantage over most of the other patients: in that world beyond Basingstoke, he could pass as an ordinary man as long as he kept his clothes on. Still, this passing came at an emotional cost; a rigidly moral man, he had to lie constantly. When he returned to Dublin and ran into his fellow medical students, he had to invent stories to explain why he limped and sometimes had to walk with a cane. He blamed his troubles on the war - insinuating he'd been maimed in the Blitz, which he had not.
To keep the other students from asking questions, he cultivated a reputation as a stodgy bachelor, an older student who sequestered himself in the little house he owned. Now and then he asked young women out to dances and swooped around the floor in his white tie and tails. But Dillon didn't go on second dates. "One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children. That was the basis of my ethics," he wrote later.
Ethics weren't the half of it. How many women would be willing to risk the scandal of marrying the first artificial male? None, probably. At any rate, he didn't care to risk finding out. To marry a young woman, he would have to confess too much to her: the thirteen operations, the testosterone pills, the years of living as Laura. He was terrified, too, of what would happen if he ever did work up the nerve to tell a girlfriend about himself; he imagined how the smile would freeze on her face and her eyes would dart away, and how, when she looked back at him, she would no longer see him as a real man. He couldn't bear that. And so he avoided women. "I felt resentful that I should always be alone and never have a wife and children," he wrote.
Still, he loved the way he looked in his tie and tails; he enjoyed a night of dancing, and an evening of playful flirting eased his loneliness a bit. So he took out a nurse or female student now and then, but he never let her closer than the arms-length of a waltz. He kept his distance by treating women in a "rough brotherly fashion," developing a reputation as a bit of a woman-hater. He liked to lecture his dates about how the female brain was more suited to housework than intellectual pursuits - a strategy guaranteed to stifle any romance.
Dillon claims that his misogyny was all an act, one of the tools he used to keep women from falling in love with him. But, in fact, he did believe the female mind to be a strange and rather frightening organ. Women had hurt him, over and over again, even before the sex change. In Laura Dillon's teenage and university years, she had fallen in love with at least two straight women. Both of them pushed Laura away. The worst part was that these would-be sweethearts had regarded her as a lesbian rather than as the man she wanted to be. Dillon had enjoyed only a few close friendships, and these had almost always been with men - back-slapping boys who accepted Dillon as a brother.
So, women could not be trusted. Dillon had learned this early on. By age 35, he had vowed never to fall in love.
* * *
And then Roberta Cowell slid into the seat across from him at that London restaurant, and he dared to hope again. Her wrists - slim and delicate from the estrogen treatments - peeped out of the cuffs of her sleeves. Her cheeks flamed pink, so soft below the short man's haircut. In the blur of Roberta Cowell's face, he could see the lovely ingnue she would become. Somewhere in there lived the one woman who could understand him, the one woman who could recognize him as a real man.
He had decided, from the logic of his own profound isolation, that Cowell must be his soulmate. Dillon was lonely in the way we can all recognize, and he also suffered from a brand-new, 20th century solitude too, one that had never existed before - the loneliness of a medical miracle, of the person who has experienced unique states of mind and body. He'd dared to confide in so few friends, and even the kindest of them had never really understood.
But now, he shared a table with the first person he'd ever met who entered that blur of hormones, who planned to transform her body just as he had. She relied on him, he liked to believe, not just as a doctor but also a man with a superior mind, who could guide her through difficulties. Dillon, too, had endured the torment of the in-between period when the hormones began pushing his body toward androgyny; he knew what it was like to stumble through a city street where passersby stared at him.
She was three years younger than he was, but seemed younger than that. She implored him for help; she needed him utterly. Dillon had waited his whole life for a woman to fasten her eyes on him the way she did, to ask for his protection.
And so he trusted Roberta immediately. By the end of lunch, he'd poured out his story to her - surprising even himself with his openness.
Then they parted. He returned to Dublin, where he was finishing up the last year of medical school, but Roberta continued to haunt him, to tug at his heart. He mailed her letters brimming with advice and tender confessions. "The chief feeling you arouse in me, Bobbie, is a desire to protect you and to treat you gently and steer you along," he wrote. Whenever Dillon traveled to London, he made sure to call on her.
At one of these early meetings, "He ... whipped out the penis, which he was very proud of," wrote Cowell. "It wasn't any kind of seduction scene. He just wanted me to see what medical science had achieved. I had never seen anything like it. It was huge, and in a constant state of semi-erection." She made a joke about the thing being rough-hewn. He didn't laugh. "Dillon did not exactly have the most perfectly developed sense of humor," according to Cowell. Though, really, how could he have laughed? He'd unzipped for her; he'd showed her the evidence of his excruciating pain, all those operations and infections. He'd wanted her to see how he'd turned that suffering into a handsome piece of flesh. And all she could do was snigger.
Still, he refused to be discouraged. In his terrible loneliness, Roberta Cowell began to haunt his thoughts. For the first time in his life, Dillon allowed himself to believe that one person might be able to understand him. He sent her long confessional letters about his girlhood and his years at Oxford. He wanted her to know everything. She wrote back to him, when she could find the time. They talked on the phone, when she was in.
It was 1951 now, Cowell had turned herself into a va-va-voom peroxide blonde; she'd begun venturing out onto the streets of London in a wig, skirt, make-up. She had yet to go through the vaginal-construction surgery and the facelift, but already she scorched the eyes of sailors as she flitted past them on the sidewalk.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The First Man-Made Man by Pagan Kennedy Copyright © 2006 by Pagan Kennedy . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B002TTICN2
- Publisher : Bloomsbury USA; 1st edition (December 11, 2008)
- Publication date : December 11, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 1642 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 226 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,556,988 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,140 in Gay Studies
- #2,676 in Gender Studies (Kindle Store)
- #7,254 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- Customer Reviews:
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The process of Dillon becoming a trans man occurred over about 10 years, through the 1940s, and the author does an excellent job of describing the challenges Dillon faced in dealing with family and friends, employers, and even the press. Dillon was an intelligent, complex, and interesting individual. The author writes: “Dillon’s tale proves just how far a human being can bend, how protean we are, how raw with possibility. He inhabited a dizzying array of roles: schoolgirl, doctor, besotted suitor, sailor, mystic. . . . Dillon could never change his desire for change.”
The period covered in the book includes people such as Christine Jorgensen, the famous trans woman. The author also discusses the impact of endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, who contended no one was entirely male or female; sexologist John Money who introduced gender roles as distinct from biological sex; surgeon Sir Harold Gilles who could build a penis from flesh harvested from elsewhere on the body; and Eugen Steinach who discovered the power of sex hormones. Many other characters impacted the art and science of what was called at the time, transsexualism.
Michael Dillon, though, is so much more. He wrote extensively and his memoir was published posthumously, many years after his death – I believe it was even after the publication of Kennedy’s book in 2007. In addition to the transsexual angle, Kennedy’s chapters on Dillon’s travels and experiences with Tibetan Buddhism are equally fascinating, including significant religious and political developments in China and Tibet. There is so much in this relatively short book. It is a valuable addition to the literature on these topics.
Unfortunately, the excellent writing in the Kindle version is marred by typos. It appears that those typos were generated by OCR scanning a hardcopy. For example, an obvious "b" in a word ends up an "h" in the Kindle version. It's very disappointing that the Kindle version was not proofed sufficiently. The typos are jarring in an otherwise high quality book, which I would have rated 5 stars.
Dillon however, is a man who deserves it (a film too, hopefully, but they'd better cast a man to play him, this habit of women playing transitioned men just doesn't do them justice). Not only was Michael the first to transition to male before the word "transexual" existed, before Christine Jorgensen came out, but he lived the life of a legend- outfitting the oxfords womens row team in mens uniforms and rowing them upstream, dodging bombs and putting out fires during the blitz, publishing the first book on the medical ethics of treating transexuality with hormones, becoming an MD and performing an illegal operation on another transexual, working on ships crossing the globe for months at sea, giving up all worldly possessions and fleeing to the cliffs of Tibet to live as the only westerner at the hellish Rizong monastery...trans or not, this guys life is as exciting as Hemingway's, and he deserves his place in the annals of modern western history. I was surprised I'd never heard of him before.
One thing I did not like was that the author sort of gave him this "pathetic" flavor, which is commonly projected onto the lives of trans people. "Poor Michael Dillon, he just wanted to be normal and he never got peace and his penis was weird and he never got laid". It's sad that even a pioneering, dauntless, incredible individual who changed reality to conform to his vision, who lived a tumultuous, georgeous, meaningful life to rival any of the 20th century, is framed through this lens. I woudl give 4.5 stars- it could not totally avoid the "depressing tranny" trap. (It's true he was never fully happy in the end, but who would be after years of being reviled and treated like the elephant man? Irregardless, transition is not a panacea for all problems in one's life). Also, there was not enough about the love affair, which seemed unrequited and slightly disappointing.
I found the info about the beginnings of plastic surgery and sexual medicine/psychology to be fascinating.
What was also fascinating to me, is the sheer magic of him- even in this day and age, when there are laws in many cities to protect trans from discrimination, when there are trans bars and shows and dating sites and guidances for treating transition- it is very difficult to convince person after person to change your identity documentation and records. In the 1920's, before Harry Benjamin, before Christine Jorgenson, before even Hirschfield- Michael Dillon was able to convince a doctor to give him testosterone, convince legal personnel to change his papers, others to change his name in the peerage books that list noble family trees and make himself heir, convince an army surgeon to perform surgery on him, convince a couple of tibetan monks to accept him as a white transsexual despite their taboos. He did this all above board, explaining himself. This succession of feats suggests that despite the way the author fleshes him as nerdy, somewhat arrogant, sort of socially pathetic- that he must have also had a level of charisma or personal power that is not accounted for.
I now find myself compelled to respond to comments made by other reviewers, in the context of Dillon's biography:
The suggestion by another reviewer that Michael would have been satisfied today living as an athletic or lesbian woman is just preposterous. (Although lesbianism is currently the height of glam, more FTM's are transitioning now than ever. It's possible that as a trans man today, he would not have gotten a phalloplasty- as today you can live a full happy life as a man with a tiny clit-dick and male ID and father children with donated sperm- but who knows, some guys still want the phallus. )
With a blooming gay/lesbian club scene in Berlin that would rival modern San Francisco, an athletic androgynous look that would make him a hot butch, and a family with nobility/wealth he could have played absentee daughter and lived out some ultra cool peter pan fantasy as an androgynous tomboy dyke with an Eton haircut. Instead he spent years of his life "hunting" doctors and chasing false leads, studying chemistry and medicine and mysticism. He spend every ounce of his energy-physical, mental, emotional, spiritual- to virtually bend time and space and other people's minds- in order to obtain what he needed to transition. This was his life's work, and in the end he was both doctor and patient, both threshway-crosser and gatekeeper. Transitioning -especially in that time and place- is *much* less acceptable/desirable, much more arduous, and required many more sacrifices than being gay would have. To say that he would not have done the same today is just obnoxious.
Another reviewer admits that someone not being able to adjust to reality and taking such drastic measures to change their sex, especially had they not heard of a precedent seems, well, crazy. Perhaps that is why it is in the diagnostic manual. Many trans people will tell you that if they were locked in a room alone for the rest of their life, they would still prioritize transition. That it is not a choice. Trans may have more in common with an eating disorder, extreme sport, or spiritual discipline than it does with being gay. Having a compulsion to change the physical sex characteristics of one's body at any cost does not "make sense", and it probably never will. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be acceptable to transition. And it doesn't mean that otherwise reasonable people afflicted by this compulsion are totally demented or doomed.
The Mystery of Transexuality is one of our modern archetypal Mysteries (in the spiritual sense of the word). That it does not "make sense" is why Michael Dillon, as a reasonable person, spent hours scrawling in notebooks trying to figure out the link between gender and hormones while bombs were literally falling around him during air raids, it is probably what drove him to medicine as a career, and it is definitely what drove him to Tibet.
What's important to remember is that a Mystery can never truly be comprehended. It can only be reconciled.